Developing an Escape Plan for PlayStation Vita

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Behind the scenes of the intriguing game from the minds that brought you Fat Princess.

By Colin Moriarty

I'm one of the lucky ones because I've had the chance to sit down and play all sorts of PlayStation Vita games. I've gotten my kicks with Uncharted: Golden Abyss, relived the greatness of Super Stardust with Delta and played the very first dual analog FPS on a handheld with Resistance: Burning Skies. But whenever I think about all of my impressive encounters with PlayStation Vita, one game is at the forefront of my mind: Escape Plan.

I played Escape Plan mere minutes after it was announced at this year's Gamescom, and I was thoroughly impressed. Escape Plan is one of those games that can really only be played on a device like Vita. It doesn't use any buttons and is completely controlled with front and back touch as well as SixAxis control. It's a puzzle game that requires gamers to bring two characters through arduous (yet comical) situations. Its graphical look is crisply black-and-white.

Laarg dealing with some bad guys.

Escape Plan comes from Fun Bits Interactive, a relatively new studio created from remnants of Titan Studios, the force behind Fat Princess on PlayStation Network. After Titan Studios went in a new direction following Fat Princess' release, some of the team spun-off to create Atomic Operations, which was then renamed Fun Bits Interactive. This studio helped create Fat Princess' Fat Roles DLC, and then began in earnest on Escape Plan for the Vita.

I was lucky enough to sit down with two of the forces behind Escape Plan, Fun Bits Interactive's CEO Chris Millar and SCEA's Senior Producer of External Development Deborah Mars. And as I found out, these two have quite the history with one another going back to before the PlayStation 3's launch. Indeed Escape Plan -- or, as they lovingly refer to it as, 'Escape' -- has been brewing for longer than Vita itself has been in existence.

Millar and Mars talked at length with me about their pet project. "Escape is something that's just been in the back of my mind for years," Chris Millar explained. He and Mars, who helps cultivate third-party content exclusively for Sony products, marinated for a while on the project. "I have a good champion with Deborah [at Sony]," he continued. The two managed to take their collaborative relationship with one another from Fat Princess to Escape Plan.

The two ultimately met at a San Francisco-area bar where they began to sketch out their ideas for the game on cocktail napkins. "We're sitting there taking the square napkin and just drawing ideas for a room, like 'what if you could do this, what if you could do that?'" Mars said. The idea ultimately evolved into what it is today with the help of the Vita's hardware, which works great for a game like this, as was proven by the impressive demo I had at Gamescom. Millar admitted as much when he told me that Sony "showed us the initial first [revisions] of the prototype hardware and immediately we were like 'this would be perfect'" for Escape Plan.

I asked these two about the impressive journalist reaction to Escape Plan's reveal at Sony's press conference in Germany. It was certainly one of the games that stole Sony's admittedly weak Gamescom showing. "We ducked out [of the conference] early to go set up downstairs (where the game was to be playable) and there's already people starting to line up... it was a great night. We were going until about 12 o'clock" with the demos, when everything was supposed to wrap-up by 11.

But what I was most interested in when I sat down with Millar and Mars was where such a clever game came from in the first place. With the idea having brewed for so long and having been designed in premise before Vita was revealed, it certainly must have looked and played differently at some point. For instance, was it always black and white?